THE SPRINGFIELD SUNDAY UNION

and REPUBLICAN

Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

21 June 1931

(pages 3E - 4E)

Maugham Believes Luck Plays

Large Part In Winning Success.

Famous Author Reveals Some Interesting Incidents of

Life and Beliefs—“Of Human Bondage” Will Assure Him

Immortality—Recognizes Advantages of Money—Villa

Mauresque His Pleasant Home—Sometimes Gets “Stuck.”

Success is a toss of a coin. Somerset Maugham said to me as he stood in the huge living room of the Villa Mauresque which, from the height of Cap-Ferrat raises its white square bulk amid an orderly forest of pines that murmur continual answer to the winds from the Mediterranean and the waves breaking in kindred song upon the rocks directly below.

Mr. Maugham, like every true Englishman, is a lover of the home. After long and far wanderings he has finally found his castle high here above the sea. This massive and at the same time impressive Moorish mansion on the coast of southern France is one symbol of success, so well deserved in Mr. Maugham’s case.

[ . . . ]

In discussing the depicting of character, Mr. Maugham felt that novelist or dramatist must always have some actual person in mind if only as a starting point for creation. The rest must be drawn from the depths of the artist.

“If the character one wants to create are not in oneself they are difficult to create.”

There are some of us that perhaps will take exception to this. One cannot quite imagine Mr. Maugham having anything of the characteristic of Strickland, in the “Moon and Sixpence” or Roy in “Cakes and Ale.” In one of his least known books and certainly not among his best ones “The Magician,” the chief character is Aleister Crowley, English poet, dabbler in black magic, and leader of a mystic religious cult. In spite of the book not having the literary fineness of some of his later work, Mr. Maugham in this still at times achieves an atmosphere of sheer horror, of uncanny diabolism that are as moving as any in this genre of literary endeavor, and equal anything in “Dracula” or the works of Poe. When I first met Crowley in Paris in 1928 he seemed quite proud of being in the book and insisted on taking me to see a film made from the novel. However, in his “Confessions,” [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] published recently in London is six volumes, Crowley writes very bitterly about the book.

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